Quotes from Jordan B. Peterson

Much of what we consider healthy mental function is the result of our ability to use the reactions of others to keep our complex selves functional. We outsource the problem of our sanity.

a simple-minded I-know-it-all approach is no match for the complexity of existence.

No one standing still can triumph, no matter how well constituted.

Ambition is often—and often purposefully—misidentified with the desire for power, and damned with faint praise, and denigrated, and punished. And ambition is sometimes exactly that wish for undue influence on others. But there is a crucial difference between sometimes and always. Authority is not mere power, and it is extremely unhelpful, even dangerous, to confuse the two. When people exert power

Chaos is the domain of ignorance itself. It's unexplored territory. Chaos is what extends, eternally and without limit, beyond the boundaries of all states, all ideas, and all disciplines. It's the foreigner, the stranger, the member of another gang, the rustle in the bushes in the night-time, the monster under the bed, the hidden anger of your mother, and the sickness of your child. Chaos is the despair and horror you feel when you have been profoundly betrayed.

Those who are power hungry—tyrannical and cruel, even psychopathic—desire control over others so that every selfish whim of hedonism can be immediately gratified; so that envy can destroy its target; so that resentment can find its expression. But good people are ambitious (and diligent, honest, and focused along with it) instead because they are possessed by the desire to solve genuine, serious problems.

We are thus eternally caught between the most diamantine rock and the hardest of places: loss of group-centred belief renders life chaotic, miserable, intolerable; presence of group-centred belief makes conflict with other groups inevitable

Life is indistinguishable from effortful maintenance. No one finds a match so perfect that the need for continued attention and work vanishes (and, besides, if you found the perfect person, he or she would run away from ever-so-imperfect you in justifiable horror). In truth, what you need—what you deserve, after all—is someone exactly as imperfect as you.

Elige tu destino y expresa tu Ser. Como el gran filósofo alemán del siglo XIX Friedrich Nietzsche observó tan brillantemente: «Quien tiene un porqué para vivir encontrará casi siempre el cómo».67

Every bit of learning is a little death. Every bit of new information challenges a previous conception, forcing it to dissolve into chaos before it can be reborn as something better. Sometimes such deaths virtually destroy us. In such cases, we might never recover or, if we do, we change a lot.

The individual is molded by the social world. But social institutions are molded, too, by the requirements of the individuals who compose them.

Gender is constructed, but an individual who desires gender re-assignment surgery is to be unarguably considered a man trapped in a woman's body (or vice versa). The fact that both of these cannot logically be true, simultaneously, is just ignored

You just didn't want to know. So, you didn't. You just rejected the responsibility of discipline, and justified it with a continual show of your niceness. Every

that is, the doubt that doubt itself is an ultimately reliable guide) objects: the worst decision of all is none.

from camouflaging your vice with virtue. What shall I do with the world? Conduct myself as if Being is more valuable than Non-Being. Act so that you are not made bitter and corrupt by the tragedy of existence. That's the essence of Rule 1 (Stand up straight with your shoulders back): confront the uncertainty of the world voluntarily, and with faith and courage.

If you confront the limitations of life courageously, that provides you with a certain psychological purpose that serves as an antidote to the suffering.

We cannot live without food, water, clean air, and shelter. Less self-evidently, we require companionship, play, touch, and intimacy. These are all biological as well as psychological necessities (and this is by no means a comprehensive list).

Now, power may accompany authority, and perhaps it must. However, and more important, genuine authority constrains the arbitrary exercise of power.

That would be fine if trouble did not compound, like interest—but we all know that it does.

The Christian church described by the Grand Inquisitor is the same church pilloried by Nietzsche. Childish, sanctimonious, patriarchal, servant of the state, that church is everything rotten still objected to by modern critics of Christianity.

What could I do, that I would do, to make Life a little better?

Because the world is revealed, to an indeterminate degree, through the template of your values. If the world you are seeing is not the world you want, therefore, it's time to examine your values. It's time to rid yourself of your current presuppositions. It's time to let go. It might even be time to sacrifice what you love best, so that you can become who you might become, instead of staying who you are.

Hemos perdido el universo mítico de la mente preexperimental, o al menos hemos dejado de propiciar su desarrollo. Esa pérdida ha dejado nuestro creciente poder tecnológico más peligrosamente a la merced de nuestros sistemas de valoración, que todavía son inconscientes.

But if it's uncertain that our ideals are attainable, why do we bother reaching in the first place? Because if you don't reach for them, it is certain you will never feel that your life has meaning.